you have to be a little bit crazy to survive

Entries tagged with alien

I was part of an elite, armed investigative team going into an ocean-side science station to find out what had happened to it. Only the first part of the station was on land, the rest of which was located underwater, and it was connected by corridors, stairs, and elevators. The first section had bad lighting, papers and equipment scattered everywhere, and finally we started finding bodies as we went into the underwater sections.

The group was split up at some point, and one of the other smaller groups was attacked. A girl survived her initial injuries and we had her resting at the makeshift medical room we set up. My sub-group did some more exploring and had an encounter with another of the things that had attacked her, and they were freakish humanoid forms with weird delicate-seeming spikes and rings of almost barbed-wire shaped protrusions all over their faces.

I don't think I actually managed to kill it, but I was able to clear an area and noticed a map on the wall. It showed a side view of the complex with each area marked as a white rectangle with connections between each section. There were only about four or five sections and it didn't seem to go as far down as it could, more outwards into the ocean water. There was also a second floor section about half-way between the initial entry area and one of the sections out in the water, but I had a feeling the source of the problems was down and not up. I was trying to figure out how to get to the next section further into the water, but ended up going back to where the majority of our people were for the moment.

The girl in the medical room started showing signs of changing into one of the creatures. Stuff was beginning to grow out of her face and she started screaming as the changes became more severe. At some point she calmed down and dazedly suggested she go further into the complex alone, because maybe the creatures would leave her alone now that she was becoming like them. I had a bad feeling she was hurting so bad, she was in fact planning suicide by putting herself at the mercy of the enemy.

She became too disoriented to use for the plan, but one of our big marines was showing signs of changing too, yet he had not been bitten or injured. Did that mean the virulent creature DNA was somehow airborne? His changes weren't as severe, but he had a weird line of almost stitch-looking spines set flush into his skin, that traveled from roughly his chin up across his cheeks to his forehead on both sides of his face. He suggested he should try the plan for getting further into the complex without getting eaten.

My perspective shifted to the marine, and he had already made it much further and deeper into the complex. This area appeared to have been built into solid ground, the shallow end of the ocean floor. I could see a bunch of the creatures ahead, and as they started rushing towards me I thought the plan was going to fail after all. But they slowed down, and then started walking up the side of a ridge of nearby dirt. I had a headset on, and I said over the communications to the rest of the team, "I think they're trying to show me something."

The ridge of packed dirt was taller than me, so it took climbing it to see what lay beyond. I beheld a huge crater, so gigantic it nearly broke my brain and gave me vertigo. But I held my place and tried to figure out what had happened here. The shape of the crater almost made it feel like a ridiculously-huge sphere had once rested here, but really it must have been the end result of a huge excavation. I didn't remember seeing anything like this on the wall map, because a room this size would have dwarfed the scale used in that map. Thus, it was some kind of mega-secret project that had ended up killing a lot of people and turned the rest into aliens.

At the very bottom of the crater I could see what looked like a small exposed edge of dirty, beige-colored metal. Was that part of an alien craft? How come it had not been excavated fully? Had they found other pieces before reaching that one, or was the alien DNA so nasty that it had affected people almost immediately once they started uncovering that piece? Maybe it was some kind of space-microbe on the outside of a ship and nobody had even seen what else lay beneath the dirt.

Back at the command center the team had set up, there were lines of chat on a screen that had been sent from the marine (so much for the audio signal idea). The first two were something along the lines of "Here goes nothing." and "[soldier's name], signing off." Suddenly a new line appeared, in all caps, and it was maybe ten letters smooshed together that indicated the man was still conscious and still at least someone in charge of his own mind.

Then I was Mei in Overwatch, where I was using my ice-blast gun to freeze and kill the alien creatures and they gave experience points every time they died. I was keeping up with respawn so I only had to kill one or two at a time and not a whole room. And finally I woke up.

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Thoughts: I would have liked to have left the end off, but it just kind of shows how doofy the subconscious can be. I had a great, freaky, dark theme going on there, thanks dream! :P I really do wish I could remember what exactly the lines of text were, I almost think part of the last one was "IAMGOOD" but I'm not sure. I also vaguely remember something coming up about depressurization at one point but I am not sure where that fell into the dream and it was most likely one of the more messed up parts of dream logic.

This chat excerpt sums it up well, considering a lot was nonsense and illogic that's difficult to describe in the real, awake world:

[10:51:20 PM] I dreamed the other night that round aliens with a cutsey-type anime eyes face (think gummy critters) came to earth in giant tree-shaped ships, and one of them asked me to order her pizza[10:51:31 PM] and she was kinda heavy to carry around[10:51:51 PM] I have no idea what the fr0g was up with that XD

I was outside at night, near a house where I lived with some other people. I had the impression that nobody else was outside. Maybe something major on television that I wasn't interested in for some reason. And this wasn't just in my area, but everywhere. I looked up at the stars, and saw an opening in the sky, somewhat wide and rectangular with rounded edges. It was set up with the longer length going from left to right as I was viewing it (as opposed to up-down or diagonal).

It was so high up in the sky, it about broke my brain looking at it. I realized it had to be on the very edge of the atmosphere, which meant it had to be huge. There were tiny lights spaced around the inside edge of it, the opening having enough of a thickness that it was part of a wall, maybe a wall that went all the way around the earth; the lights blinked in slow unison. Through the opening I could see blueish swirling mists, and then what looked like randomly-designed alien spacecraft flying by on the other side.

The door began to open wider just by slowly making itself bigger upwards and downwards. I found this really strange, because surely I wasn't supposed to be seeing this and who knows how long it had been hidden by whoever was behind this. Maybe they still had no idea their door/portal/whatever it was, was visible and still very much so. I could see a huge ship looming beyond as the door opened to a square. The ship looked something like the Enterprise from Star Trek but darker and I could only really see the disk portion.

Then suddenly the door began to close really quickly, and when it closed completely I couldn't see it anymore. Hmm, somebody figured out the thing was visible finally. I vaguely remember being really dizzy, then I went inside and started telling everybody about it. I think there was more interest from some people than others (I forget as this was one of many dreams in a row), and then I noticed that there was morning sunshine outside, and I vaguely remembered that it was growing light out when I came inside.

I said something like, "And it's light out, I've lost some time." This meant the aliens had noticed exactly who had seen their door, and probably done something to me, since I was standing outside in the dead of night. I could still remember what I'd seen, though, so... either they'd failed to make me forget, or were keeping tabs on me. I suddenly wondered if they could hear everything I said, if they'd maybe put some kind of monitoring device in me.

This started with other stuff but got interesting as I was standing in a parking lot outside of a tall building in the daytime. I saw a dog flying through the air like it was swimming happily through it, about ten feet off the ground. It was a golden retriever type of dog. Meanwhile, buh? I kept watching, knowing something incredible was going on, and as the dog got further away there appeared just above it a kind of black mist in a tight swirl. Jagged black lines or black lightning came down from the mist and totally disintegrated the dog, and the whole thing vanished. It gave me the impression that something had just deleted an anomaly, and I wasn't supposed to see any of it.

I remember seeing a gentleman in Victorian-era clothing off on a sidewalk a moment later, and I think there was something else odd about it but I can't remember what now. The black mist stuff appeared above him too and POOF bye mister whoever you were. There was something else too that made no sense and then black-mist-vanished, can't remember what it was, but at this point I looked up at the sky and noticed there were very dark clouds that were parting in a wide circle above the tall building near me. I could see the side of a building with a whole bunch of windows in kinda dated apartment style, and that was falling very slowly downwards.

I realized there must be some kind of instability between our dimension and one nearby, and that I probably had very little time to find somewhere safe from the impending crash of that building up above. I had no idea how big the thing even was, and had a feeling that running away wouldn't suffice. So I ran into the big building because I (somehow) knew it had a deep basement system. I ran inside and started yelling for anyone to hear that they had to get down under the ground as far as possible. Even if we ended up buried but alive we might have a chance to get out or get dug out, in the meantime I just yelled at random people to go downstairs as far as they could.

I found some people having a church service in one room as I was trying to find the stairs down, and they were having trouble believing me. Whatever, sucks to be them, I kept going until I found a way down. The dream setting started to shift to where I was now only in a house and there was a downstairs that was still unfortunately half-open to open ground (large windows filled one wall, it was like the house was built on the side of uneven ground so the front door upstairs was on one level of ground and the bottom opened out onto the lower ground).

I was now trying to get a bunch of kids to hide, and I remember ducking down almost behind one couch and then thinking as I sat there that this wasn't going to help. I ran back upstairs and found a closet that had a laundry machine in it and enough room for someone to be in there. Several someone's technically, another girl arrived and wanted to hide with me while a third thought she could find somewhere better. I tried to tell her otherwise but she ran off so we shut the door.

Then the crash hit, and logic went all to heck. It felt like the closet had somehow been separated from the house and catapulted straight upwards. The explosion outside was something now like a nuke going off, and as the other girl and I kept our feet against the door while sitting on the floor with our backs to the washing machine, the floor started getting really hot. There were random sheets of metal like extra-large cookie sheets and possibly a flat plywood section or something, I tried sticking one or two of those under us to keep from being fried as the floor took on a look that it was burning straight through (reminded me a bit of partly-cooled lava texture in video games).

I remember thinking that if we were flying through the air, at some point we'd come back down and I had no idea how we were supposed to survive the impact. The logic fell apart so much though that the dream began to change entirely, to the point that I think I was telling someone else about it in a new house in a new location that I thought was actually not a dream, knowing at that point that the other part was a dream. I think I believed it was a warning, though, and that something really bad was about to happen.

I remember the idea that something tipped me off, but I'm not sure what. I ran to the windows and looked out, and saw a whole bunch of ridiculously large metal cubes (like Borg ships but smoother) arriving in the sky very high up and hovering there. I said, "They're here," and I told everyone to hide. There were random children of various ages and one or two adults in this house that my dream-self knew, and one person from real life which was my little sister who the dream decided was about thirteen again.

So yes, I told everyone to hide and I told them not to move, no to try and run away. Just find a good place to hide inside the house and stay there. I grabbed my white down comforter (that I actually own in real life) and found a closet that was painted white inside with fairly large shelves, like you could stack three or four rolls of toilet paper on each one. There was actually packages of toilet paper in there and not much else, and there were really only about two of them though they were some of the bigger packages (12 rolls, 24 rolls). I scooted under the bottom shelf with the comforter, toilet paper, and a random box of a half-decent size. Right at that moment my sister showed up to stand outside the door.

She seemed unsure this was going to work but I told her again to go hide, it was our only chance. She disappeared and I finished making a fairly decent hiding spot if nobody pulled the stuff out of the way. I lay there perfectly still and closed my eyes, and for some reason by this point the dream had decided there hadn't been a door on the closet in the first place. The house got very quiet and I started feeling very sleepy. So sleepy that it was like I could fall asleep right there even knowing we were about to or quite possibly now currently being invaded by aliens. I remember thinking I hoped if I fell asleep I would remain still and would survive simply because I remained hidden even while sleeping.

Light started to grow brighter, but my eyes were still closed. There wasn't any sound. I kept my eyes shut, and the light got brighter and brighter. I had a bad feeling there was one of the aliens standing outside the closet door right now, quite possibly staring straight at my hideout. I'm not sure if it was my imagination or a sorta movie-like dream info bit that showed a smooth, slender humanoid figure of a very light cream color standing out in the hall with a very bright light thing in its hands that just sort of glowed from some kind of central point.

I hoped that it couldn't literally see through the stuff I had in the way, and I was very aware for a very long moment of trying not to move, of trying to breathe without moving as much as possible. Then the light went away finally, and fairly quickly, and I realized the thing hadn't found me after all. I waited a bit longer and then peeked out from my hiding spot, saw nothing, and crept out further. One of the children came up to me whimpering and I asked if some of the others had try to run away from the house itself and she said yes. It was the two other adults, they'd been taken by the aliens and only the kids who had hidden stayed free for now.

While everyone seemed to think that for the moment we were safe, I knew better. I told them I had a bad feeling this was just a preliminary check, something fast to get the majority of people who didn't see it coming or weren't smart enough to hide right off the bat. I told them the aliens probably had some kind of device that would detect us but was clunkier to haul around or whatever, and now we needed to get out of the house. I think I was trying to figure out where to go, I have vague memories of some kind of Army base being nearby (maybe not very close but worth trying to travel to on foot) or possibly another structure with some kind of underground that was abandoned or not used much, and would serve as a better place to hole up and figure out what the heck to do, meet and/or gather others who had stayed free thus far.

I don't know what my solution was in the end, though, because then I woke up.

This started as me watching a movie in a theater, and during one of the previews I noticed that the music was the theme to Raising Arizona, the one that plays during the opening credits. I said as much out loud, but nobody seemed to care. I wondered to myself if this was just trailer music or if they'd actually use it in the film. Then the movie proper started, and the first identifiable character was Bill Pullman playing someone who worked on a farm, or so it would seem since he was riding a tractor. Perhaps he was the son of the farm's owner, the feeling was that he was more than just a farmhand. The time period seemed dated, perhaps the 1930's or 40's.

Then he was walking along an orchard path with two girls, one probably in her mid 20's right next to him and the other, a teenager perhaps 14 or 15 following behind. I became the girl who was following. Bill (let's call him that because I have no idea what his character name was) and the other girl were talking, and it was obvious she was trying to be sweet on him. He seemed to be acting a little bashful over that, but wasn't being totally sweet back at her. They had very distinct southern accents, perhaps even a bit overdone (as Nostalgia Critic would say, "I'm acting!").

My own accent I knew was far different from theirs, "normal" in my opinion but an outsider here, me being a city girl from up north just visiting for the summer or something. I'd visited before, these people were family friends, maybe distant cousins... and I also liked Bill, but I wondered if he even knew I existed in that sense. (I had an inkling here of the grander plot that my character wouldn't know, that I might be surprised how much attention he actually paid me, but that he might not guess at my thoughts due to my age and not being there all the time.)

There were a lot of bright yellow flowers on the trees we were passing, and some other trees were more like tulip trees with I think pink flowers that were bulkier. I picked one of the yellow ones, it had a lot of soft petals and I smelled it as I kept following the others. I picked a second flower, and then the girl sounded like she was going to break into song. I remember thinking something like "Is this movie a musical? I had no idea..." and was hoping it wasn't going to be sucktastic (I like good musicals and well I didn't like this woman so my opinion was already a bit tainted at least of this number... nevermind that there was still the floating thought that this was a movie even though it was becoming more and more that the movie's plot and world were the real world completely).

The song ended up being something that I sang in tandem with her, and it started with the first verse of "These Are a Few of My Favorite Things" (from The Sound Of Music). It would seem we'd practiced this to performance level, for a local talent show that we'd already done. I had the melody after her, and a made-up bit of completely original tune and words (which I can't remember now) and then she had her own bit after me. We even did a bit of almost folk-type dancing together, and as this was going on... the setting went from broad daylight to night without my noticing any great flaw in the logic.

Our path had taken us into a hayfield or something similar, and the section where we were now as her song part continued seemed freshly mowed. Due to how dark it was, I was feeling uncomfortable about the odd mown layer of grass-like clippings on the ground over the inch-high remaining stalks. I think the singing stopped, and I was wondering to myself how safe it was to be out here this late, perhaps we should go back...

I was a bit further ahead of the others, and suddenly my head started to hurt. I put my hand to my forehead and fell backwards, at least the ground was kind of soft and I don't remember that being an issue. What I do remember is saying, "It's happening again!" like I'd forgotten about this but was now remembering that something had happened before. I could hear the others sounding concerned in the distance, Bill I think shouted something, but all I could really do was look up at the clear night sky with its billions of stars.

Suddenly all was completely silent. I think I said something like, "Is someone there?" and my voice sounded weirdly echoey, like I was suddenly in a completely different space I couldn't see. I could see my own reflection slightly, a little bit above me, which didn't make sense, but there it was. Then there was a bright blue-white light that seemed to come from nowhere in the stars and got bigger and brighter very fast, coming straight at me and engulfing me and I screamed in fear and tried to raise my arms up in front of my face.

I felt a strong pull and knew that whatever it was, it had captured me. It was too bright to see but I had the impression of a great deal of speed and travel upwards into the sky and beyond. Once I could see again, I found myself in a very strange, smallish... room-thing. (Being as this was a time period when space travel didn't exist, along with a lot of established sci-fi conventions, "I" was very confused by a layout that wouldn't be all that unconventional for a modern day mind.) If I had been able to move properly, I might have been able to touch the sides of the grey metal shaft that I seemed to be at the top of, and the front and back would have been barely in reach. The walls to the left and right of me didn't have a sharp corner up above, but a more gentle curve up to a flat ceiling not real far above me. I think there was a window to my right, where I could see outer space, but I was too afraid to be distracted by that.

I was being held in place by glass inch-thick plate-like separators that seemed to extend from the walls horizontally and had holes in them to fit my neck, my chest at about my elbows, and probably a couple more points down lower. I couldn't really see what was down below me. Being stuck like this was frightening but it didn't really hurt because I was technically floating. I didn't know if something was supposed to happen to me, or had already happened to me, but I knew I couldn't remember anything so detailed as this from before and wondered if I was more conscious than whoever this was... aliens... thought I was.

The plates started to retract away from me, having even splits in them and pulling into the walls, and then part of the wall in front of me slid down, revealing a window where behind was a boy maybe my age or a little older. He was wearing a grey jumpsuit and had brown hair that was roughly shoulder-length and in an unconventional style (vaguely emo-ish). We stared at each other for a moment, he looked just as confused as I'm sure I did, and then I realized that I was being drawn downwards by an unseen force.

He started banging on the window and shouting, "Let me out!" as the force became faster, and I could tell he wasn't yelling at me, more at whoever was doing this. I lost sight of him quickly though and suddenly couldn't see, the world growing very dark. I felt a strong push backwards, very strong, the same unknown force that never actually seemed to touch me. Then backwards became down, and fast, as if that direction had always been down, and I felt like I hit something soft so fast that it stunned me.

I realized my eyes were closed and most of my body unresponsive, but I could move my left hand and felt around. I was recognizing my own bed (not my real-life one, but this dream was continuing to supply built-in-past facts as needed). I concentrated on waking up, though I knew what I'd just been through wasn't a dream, and I had no idea how long I'd been back, what the others had seen, or how my return had been explained to my parents in the house below, or if they even knew I was back. I had a feeling they did, that somehow what had happened could be explained away and that they'd call me crazy or over-imaginative for telling the truth... which I was going to to anyways. Meanwhile I was able to get up finally and felt really fuzzy, like my body was still half asleep.

I got off the top bunk of the bunk beds I slept in and knew I had to draw what I could remember. I was also thinking about the boy, wondering if he was trapped there indefinitely and wondering if there was some way to save him. Plus, he was cute, and I had to wonder if we'd met before but I just couldn't remember. I tried to find paper and a working pencil, also pulling down the blinds and closing curtains nearby thinking that the aliens might still be watching me and might not want me to be able to remember so much of what I'd seen this time. I had trouble with the curtains, and eventually called it good and tried to turn on a light to see better, but that barely did anything at all (and I remember saying out loud, "oh, so it's going to be like that," as a reference to lights not working properly in dreams, but I didn't catch this thought well enough to make it a true lucid dream).

I ended up leafing through a large newsprint-like sketchpad and finding a half-cut-up scrap and an ink pen. I drew the top area of the ship I'd been trapped in, just the general shape of it and without the concept of the window(s) or the boy. I drew it really badly, I seemed to be having trouble getting the concept of drawing to cooperate, but by the end of it I had at least the shape and the idea that it had a lot of rivets down on paper. I tore the drawing out of the sketchpad and headed for the door.

I'm not sure how the dream started, but the first part I remember vaguely was almost like watching television or stock footage of meteorites or fallen space debris landing on earth, creating craters and blowing through buildings like they were nothing.

The next part I remember more clearly was being in front of the double doors of a small building that had a dock attached to it; the water was either a lake or a large inlet from the ocean. The doors were behind me, there was a grassy area to the right where one could access the dock/building, and then the dock stretched out in front of me. Above the entrance area where I was standing, there was a patio cover for shade and the sky directly above wasn't visible because of it. It was daytime and sunny.

The idea of meteorites was sticking in the dream plot, and there were other people under the shade with me. A bunch of them went inside because they were afraid of getting hurt, but I knew it didn't make a bit of difference trying to hide in a building and instead went to peeked out from under the shade. I saw very high up two little meandering white trails in the partly-cloudy sky. The trails moved quickly but oddly enough they weren't straight lines like one would expect from a meteorite. I knew that's what they were though.

There was a black guy who seemed to have a sense of humor about the whole thing but he was still staying completely under the shade. I moved back a couple steps to tell him what I'd seen, and managed to convince him to go look again with me. Now the trails being left by the incoming things were straight, and it seemed like they were coming almost right at us. Then we realized they were and we ducked back under the shade as one of them landed maybe a few yards away on the grass and bounced a couple of times (dream logic fail), still heading for me particularly.

I fell down backwards and landed sitting just before the thing stopped right next to me. I was quite a bit surprised, but since it was there I touched it. It looked like a chunk of ice maybe the size of a loaf of bread at most and felt smooth and slightly warm. Then I made a joke to the black guy, something along the lines of, "Well, if it's got a space virus on it, I've got it now," as I rubbed the fingers together that had touched the thing.

There was some kind of low booming vibration noise now, and I went to look more to the right of the shaded area (though we were still under it) with the black guy. We could now see that we'd missed the impact of a huge meteorite far off in the distance in some mountains. The smoke cloud now rising from that area made it hard to see exactly what was going on, but it almost looked like the meteorite was as big as the smoke cloud was round, which would make it several miles in diameter.

Then our attention was drawn back to the water, where we'd missed yet another hit very much closer, and oddly enough it didn't seem to be making noise like expected. The strike had landed in the water about twenty yards from the end of the dock. Again there was the impression that the meteorite was as big as the smoke cloud rising from it, and the smoke and water seemed to be boiling with the meteorite only partly submerged. Then the smoke cleared like dramatic cinematography special effects to reveal a large black sphere with an oily, shiny surface.

The black dude had enough and ran for the doors, but I walked towards the sphere instead and remember saying out loud, "I've seen this somewhere before..." almost like a suppressed memory was trying to get through. The guy was yelling at me but I was half-entranced by the thing. Then an invisible, powerful force pulled me off the dock and through the air towards the sphere as if I were nothing. I knew it was the sphere doing this, and that it was intelligent.

I had a sense that I was in danger, but was still fairly mesmerized by the sphere. I held my hands out to it like I wanted to touch it, and it seemed like it was looking at me somehow even if the surface didn't change. It had me slowly circling it towards the side away from the building, and then suddenly it moved me faster so I was behind it and out of sight of the others. Part of the sphere's side started shifting and stretching and making a hollow area in its side and then I was sucked into it. The stuff closed around me and I realized I couldn't move, or breathe, and there was no light at all.

The next thing I remember, I must have "woken up" from blacking out or something because I found myself in what looked like underground interconnecting rooms of a city building somewhere. There were a lot of exposed pipes and concrete walls, floor, and ceiling. A guy was there, white this time and probably in his 40's, he seemed like military or ex-military and was dressed in casual clothing. He told me his resistance group had saved me from the sphere, as they already knew somehow that even with all things the alien spheres were immune to, they could be defeated with soda pop.

He said they'd cleared a lot of it out of my system but that there was still some there. I discovered this was true while trying to clear my throat, and coughed up nasty black stuff onto the floor. The guy had a can of pop and used some of it on the black stuff to make sure it was dead (I don't really remember what it did). I think he said that I could eat something to regain strength, but that their doctor wanted me to drink a bunch of soda sometime soon and get the rest of the junk cleared out (which would mean throwing up a lot ^^; ). I decided to go find the doctor and get it done sooner than later.

I'm already forgetting a lot of this, but it started somewhere in trying to find a movie theater I was supposed to be going to with my randomly dream created friends. I'd gotten separated from them and was trying to find them again in an area like an outdoor shopping mall. It was starting to get dark as I neared the movie theater itself, and then something huge and flaming crashed down from out of the sky. Logic didn''t handle this very well, I'm not exactly sure where the thing landed but I do know it killed a lot of people in the shopping area. Also it seemed this death-from-space was a preliminary attack for aliens invading, but the dream plot didn't really do anything with that detail and I never saw the aliens (as if they stayed in orbit waiting).

I survived, and saw that the people who were left seemed to be turning into zombies. Some of them actually looked like zombies while others were normal looking people acting all "Braaaains"-ish without actually going far enough into cheesy horror tropes to say that. They also didn't talk, whereas the few non-zombie survivors were pretty much screaming their heads off (and making nice targets for getting eaten with all that noise).

Some of the dream seemed to happen out of order, and I also woke up in the middle of it and went back to sleep, straight into the same dream though it seemed to have backed up some. I am fairly sure that before I woke up the first time, I and a couple of guys who were possible military types managed to secure an old mansion and created a home base in the basement. There was a radio broadcast that helped me find them, one that was dangerous to produce but they did it every day just in case there were more survivors. It would also seem that the meteorite and zombie infection thing was more widespread than just our area.

There was also a kid who was maybe fifteenish at the most who had holed up in his family's van down by the beach, and had no idea anyone had survived that was not a zombie. I had his point of view for a little bit. There was a character who was basically Hurley from ABC's Lost who drove around looking for survivors during the daytime, and missed the kid because he hid thinking everyone was dangerous.

Meanwhile, one of the military-esque guys and I were going to go do the daily radio broadcast and I think that was the point where I woke up. Back to sleep again, and the plot had returned to previous to actually gaining the house stronghold (which sucked, that was a nice place and had taken some work). So we had to do that again, and it was noticeable now that there was nobody around on the surface during the day. Apparently the zombies didn't like sun (heh my subconscious was ripping off I Am Legend and this logic-broken version is still better than that POS Will Smith movie xP ).

We were trying to actually locate the mansion, a lot of the city and surrounding town was wrecked and a mess and we were still careful of zombies whether there were any showing or not. We ended up underground for some reason, I think raiding a weapons stash the guy with me knew was there, and we found a zombie lady who didn't actually try and kill us. She could talk, and I think we might have asked her if there was any way she could help us, if she wanted to, maybe like by spying on the zombies or something. She wasn't really sure what she could do but she wandered off to try.

My point of view switched to Hurley who was back out at the beach a second time, and he saw the kid who tried to run away. But Hurley convinced him via the usual overly-honest humor that he wasn't a zombie and told him about the rest of us and the hideout we were going to make, and that it was going to be much safer there. So the kid hopped in whatever vehicle it was Hurley had and they drove off.

(This dream happened on December 2nd but I didn't get around to posting it till today. It's very much inspired by the TV show Fringe.)

This started out with three of the Observers (odd almost FBI-agent or G-men looking characters from Fringe) coming up to a guy sitting by an indoor swimming pool. The guy was in a reclining plastic chair, and one of the Observers touched him and he started dissolving into the air as he screamed. The dissolving seemed contagious, spreading first to the Observer who had made the initial touch and then to the other two as well. All of the dust-like stuff dissolving away into the air fused into an odd big floating white thing that reminded me of a parade balloon gone wrong.

The scene changed, and it was outdoors now, a big college campus type place with lots of grass. I was standing in a park-like area there, and I knew Earth was getting taken over by aliens or whatever the inhabitants of the "other dimension" were. There was something odd happening to the sky, it was filled with dark clouds in odd colors like red and purple (I think, sooo much if this wasn't in my notes). I was with a girl who was my friend, I think just someone random created by the dream.

Suddenly, most of the other people who had been standing around the campus turned into other people who were wearing preppy-ish white t-shirts with green and blue sporty stripes on the sleeves and the bottom hem. There might have been some kind of logo on the shirt but I don't remember now. A few people hadn't been "converted" and were running screaming while these other people seemed to just be moving very slowly and seemed a bit out of it. Possibly the transition had an effect on them and they weren't up to speed yet. Either way, I could tell they were quite evil.

My friend was freaking out but I grabbed her arm and decided to run towards the side of a building that was near the edge of where the land went down to meet a big body of water. That route seemed more promising for surviving this for longer (it really felt like doom was imminent). Maybe we could find some kind of sewer outlet to escape into. As I ran, I noticed the girl become less responsive, and looked over and it was a different girl in one of those creepy t-shirts.

I let go of her and kept running, she stopped as it was my speed that had kept her going that fast. I passed some more of the creepy people who did at least still seem out of it, then I was running along the side of the building near the water. I could see an odd, huge floating alien-squid thing in the sky in the distance, and had this odd feeling that I knew if it went from where it was (kind of ahead of me) to the far right side of the sky before I could get out from under open sky, it would somehow kill me.

I could see an inlet up ahead and it looked like the sort of thing that would have a drainage pipe. I could also hear barking dogs there though as I got closer, and decided that was probably not a safe idea. The dogs looked sort of wild and quite angry. I backtracked and ran across a creepy girl but managed to lose her. I was trying to find some way into the side of the building.

There were no doors, but on closer inspection of part of the wall I realized the bricks were loose there. Pulling them out I saw there was a hole I could get into, and at first I intended to try and rebuild the wall quickly behind me but logic was failing badly and it became apparent I couldn't block it properly again. So I just went into the crawlspace I found, that opened into a bigger storage area.

There were skylight-windows in this area, and as I crept around in the more protected areas I saw some creepy butterfly-bug-alien thing fluttering around outside. I tried at first to block off some of the visibility to outside by spraying foaming bug spray on the windows, but that failed and was wasting too much time. I heard something make noise back the way I had come from, and my imagination showed me an almost xenomorph type alien (from the Alien movie series).

I found another crawl space on the far side of the storage area and tried to hide or find a way further. I realized underneath me the flooring seemed very weak, and messing with it proved I was actually in a ceiling above a wide empty space below. I decided to go through it and I vaguely remember finding a way to lower myself into the big room below. It was an auditorium for a theater type room.

I really don't remember enough of the rest to make sense of it and logic pretty much gave up at this point anyways. Eventually I woke up.

(This was actually from several days ago... and I apparently didn't save the chat log I had hoped to use to remember more bits, but oh well.)

I had Riddick's baby, but Riddick didn't seem to be around. The dream started after the giving-birth part. The baby had normal eyes and as a newborn was already trying to keep its head up without help; I noticed because I was holding the baby upright and making sure to help with the head thing and it was like... okay wow, baby is strong! (Or stubborn.) Anyways, it was a girl, but I don't remember any name for it.

Then I knew, somehow, that Riddick was dead. And it didn't bother me at all. WTF. It was just like "okay, plot point, moving on." I also knew that aliens were supposedly coming to check on this baby at some point... a sort of friendly hello / checkup /whatever. (Did I mention this dream makes no sense? More so than normal...)

The next part I remember, it was past sunset on a beach and getting quite dark, and there were a lot of teenagers goofing off in the water. I was worried about them because the current was really strong and they didn't seem to be paying attention. Then there was suddenly this long metallic leg thing that went into the water, and I looked up and saw a big spindly metal creature with a small top bit that had a blue light coming out of it. The light was finely-focused, and it seemed to be looking around with it.

Well I figured this was one of the aliens that was supposed to come see how the baby was doing. I waved at the light as it went by me but it didn't seem to care. I was just kinda going, "Oh... that's odd..." and didn't really care either, sorta watching it. Then I got a bad feeling that maybe this was an evil alien, and it was actually here for the baby for some reason and just hadn't figured that out yet.

So I started walking off down the beach away from the alien and the other people as well. Then the blue light fixed on me and I knew this wasn't good. I ran as fast as I could but something happened and I fell forward. I was so worried I'd hurt the baby, but it seemed to be okay beyond crying. I couldn't really move, like I'd been stunned or shocked by the alien. Then the baby was gone, just gone, and I knew the alien had taken her. The alien was gone too.

There was a nondescript structure nearby and someone was hiding in the shadows next to it, some Hispanic teenager. Somehow I knew he had something to do with all this, that he was one of the bad guys. I started beating him up to get information out of him, I was so upset about losing the baby. Then some of the other people from down the beach started coming over to see what had happened, see if I was alright. I told the guy to stay in the shadows because I wasn't finished with him yet, then tried to go tell the people I was okay or something.

He didn't stay put, coming out where people could see he was all banged up. They were like, "Uh, what's going on?" He finally confessed that he had something to do with this, but all he knew was there were clues hidden back at my and Riddick's house. He said he'd show me where. I think I knew a couple of the people on the beach, but they were just kinda random dream-made friends. We went back to my house (random house of dream illogic) and the guy showed us a corner and said it was under the floorboards.

By this time it seems like I'd kinda forgotten about being upset over the baby. (Sort of like not caring about Riddick being dead??) We pulled up the floorboards without any delay and started pulling things out from a small hidden area that was probably a good 4 feet deep but not very wide. One bag that came out of a decent size, someone said was diamonds. That went nowhere, apparently... it just got set aside and the dream forgot about it. We were, after all, looking for clues, but WTF. xD

There were a bunch of screwdrivers, little ones, that were supposedly a puzzle. If we could solve it, we'd know more about the grander mystery. Again, logic failed and we also failed the puzzle just as badly. Meanwhile the evil teenager kid is just sorta sitting around and I really don't remember caring about the fact that he was there or what he did anymore. (Also, at this point, it seems like we were going through not Riddick's, but Vin Diesel's stuff, and I hadn't had his baby and I didn't know him and it was Vin's house... but yeah poor Vin was still dead. GAH.) Then I found some ziplock bags in the bottom of the hidden space that had what looked like SD cards in them (the little digital camera data storage cards). I figured there was probably data we could pull off them, something that would explain hopefully at least in part what was going on.

There was more to this, but the relevent part started with me as the little girl in Aliens, and Ripley and I were headed to an elevator on a high floor of a tall building. We knew we needed to get out. (I think this was supposed to be after that movie's timeline at some later point.)

Then I changed perspectives to either myself or another female character who was with the two already there. I had the only flashlight, and although I don't remember lighting issues on the floor we were on, when the elevator arrived it was dark in there. I threw the flashlight in there on the floor, as if it was important I do so (and I think dream logic had intended it to be, then went "wtf?"). So, suddenly I'm realizing that wasn't the smartest idea as the flashlight fell apart and I knew it was broken. For some reason it had 4 batteries in it when it was fallen apart, though I knew it'd only take two (they were C or D cells, and the flashlight was black and kinda heavy-duty).

So anyways we got on the elevator and apparently there were blue glow sticks on the floor as well, so at least there was a little bit of light. It seemed like that was important for more reasons than just being able to see. Some freakish unknown thing creeping around killing people? Possibly. The elevator itself was partly messed up, missing one door, and as it started going down floors we tried to put the half of the door in the center so it blocked off as much as possible. (It was moveable like a sliding closet door since it was broken. Like that makes any sense.)

Some of the floors we passed had an odd, dim blue light. Ripley and the girl were crouched down against the door with their backs to it, and I was on the far side watching the floors go by. Suddenly I saw a small version of one of the face-hugger aliens creep around the top edge of the door. There were more on the floors we were going by as well, but so far only this one had caught the elevator. Ripley was trying to stay still and keep the girl still, covering the little one's mouth so she wouldn't make noise. They were both very scared, and I think we knew that these things shouldn't be there and not only was it a bad sign that they were, but it was entirely possible we might not live through this.

I started slowly putting the flash light back together, adding in the batteries for weight. Then I stood up and mashed the top of it onto the alien as hard as I could. This apparently killed it... and it stuck to the door in all its goey deathness. Ripley pulled part of it off and chucked it into one of the floors we were passing (reeeally fucking tall building I guess), and apparently after the thing was dead or because it was so young/small, the acid didn't bother her (or dream logic sorta went "meh, don't care"). She pulled the other part off and threw that out too.

Now two more were crawling around about the same area, and I smooshed those as well. I think Ripley also threw those out... and then we got to the bottom floor and it was really well-lit, reminded me of an airport terminal. Nobody seemed to know anything was wrong. A security guard in a white uniform showed up to like... tell us we didn't have authorization to be where we were... and it gets fuzzy around here, but I think we were supposed to get taken to see the big boss guy of the building.

Then it got utterly psychotic. The three of us were made to get on this almost Disney Land kinda ride, a hanging moving thing that we could sit in with seats on both side of a small enclosed space with an open top. It was taking us through some kind of displays, like a weird mixture of the company's history and a collection of total "wtf" items. And then we passed this odd fan that was blowing really hard and realized it was blowing bits of broken glass with the air. We tried ducking to get away but it still hit us and it hurt. I had a wide collar on my coat apparently, and I was able to pull it up high enough to at least avoid some of that.

Now I knew for sure we were still in obvious danger, and being as I wasn't sure what would be at the end of the ride, I reached out to grab various things that might be handy from the displays (some of it was close enough to touch). I broke a possibly-fiberglass oversized pencil off a statue and stuck it into my right pocket near my knee on black cargo pants I apparently was wearing. It wasn't the best weapon but it'd be better than nothing (I guess). I also managed to snag a large paperclip (the big odd-shaped X-square kind you can use to hold lots of paper) and stuck it in the left knee pocket. If they didn't search us and locked us up or something, I might be able to pick a lock with it.

We passed at least two more of the glass-blowing fan things of doom, and eventually the ride ended. We got off it in this big, posh office, with large floor-length windows to the left, an expensive table ahead of us, and lots of spendy furnishings elsewhere. There was a man to the right, well-dressed in I think a maroon suit, and we knew he was the boss. He was acting like this was just some cordial visit or something, and didn't seem antagonistic or worried about what we might think of being put through the amusement park ride from hell.

Ripley seemed a little out of it. On the table were pictures of her new line of jewelry she was apparently trying to get into as her new career. This seemed kinda stalkerish to me. There were other pictures too, of her jewelry but more of it on massive displays that looked way more fancy than where they were currently being sold. The boss guy said that this was what he wanted to offer Ripley, a bigger and much better venue with his company where she could be rich and famous and make a ton of dough.

Not only did that sound weird after all we'd been through, but then he mentioned a new kind of drug his company was producing, and said it would help her feel all better. Apparently she was already on something for post-alien-trauma-stress-stuffs. It seemed like she was kinda buying the guy's salespitch. I switched perspectives to the little girl for a moment and told her that she was fine the way she was, and that the drug was a bad idea and I didn't trust this guy. I switched back to myself, and said something like, "He's probably going to say you need just one to make it all better... and then another tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, because you'll never be able to get off it."

Ripley seemed to be getting the picture, and I moved to stand by the windows. There was a guy next to me dressed in sorta black-ops gear, and the dream just sorta decided he'd been with us the whole time, was part of our team. He looked and acted a bit like FBI Agent Charlie Francis from Fringe. Both of us were looking outside, and really close by was the waterline of a lake or very large, calm river. There was a lot of very colorful pollution in the water, and it had formed into very recognizable and artistic images along the water's edge. There were cartoon characters and other things, stuff that seemed familiar in the dream but I can't really remember what now. The pictures rippled somewhat from distortion in the water.

I wondered out loud, "I wonder if there's something sentient in there. Something creative. Possibly on the drug." The drug the guy had just mentioned... something that'd keep whatever it was trapped under the water. I don't know if anyone took me seriously or wanted to do anything about it, as the dream shifted to something elsewhere with other people and mostly unrelated.

(ganked from chat transcript cuz I'm lazy and I dunno... it kind of fits the feel of the weirdness of the entire dream)

I had an ... awful dream... Aliens finally gave me a nightmare...

well... at first it was from either like a movie or someone else's perspective, I remember this scientist guy and a couple military guys... and there was some confusion (dream logic fail) about what exactly had happened to them but they'd survived, and this was on some kind of either colony outpost or ship (yes, more logic fail, BIG DIFF lol)

well, someone finally figured out the scientist might have been uh... alienfied

and right as they're having this epiphany, my perspective changed to being the scientist

with baaaaaad abdominal pain >__>

and my brain is going NO WE ARE NOT GOING HERE ^^;

so as I'm trying to figure out what the hell to do to live thru this, somebody's figured out the alien babies don't like UV light

and they have a little flashlight that apparently gives off UV rays

.......so here we are trying to keep this thing from uh, exploding out of me

nevermind that logic failed that whole section badly

I would'a been soo dead as a real person

it was like under my skin and moving around and trying to get out and crap >__>;;

logic. fail. and damn but it hurt.

I woke up from that before it had killed me and I think we had worked out a way to get rid of it safely

This dream was long and complex, involving an alien invasion of some sort at night and part of it I saw from the ground. I remember running around a building complex trying to find something, and seeing the goings-on from other's points of view, including a guy who was on a bus that crashed. He knew it wasn't safe to go outside the bus, but he did anyways and watched a strange alien form (that looked a bit like a dark red-brown werewolf without fur) go loping away along a street.

He saw another guy heading his way with a shotgun and a hunting dog, and got the distinct impression this older man was going to kill him, maybe thinking he was an alien or had been infected by something the aliens were spreading. That didn't happen though, and the hunter let the guy tag along as he went looking for something in half-looted stores. He didn't go into the stores, just kept running by them, and one of them that looked like a jewelry store he swore vehemently at because what he was looking for had been there before the attack: a detonator for a nuke. The other guy asked if stores actually kept stuff like that and the hunter said it had been on display. Meanwhile the tag-along was wondering exactly how crazy and dangerous this dude was.

Then the setting switched to the space station humankind had apparently set up in orbit around the planet. A modified version of myself was there, and that's the point of view I had for the rest of the dream (earlier had been split between the two chars and also some movie-like moments). Vin Diesel was a character there was well named Vin (how original, at least it was easy to remember). He was some kind of soldier who was also one of very few trained to do spacewalks. I had some sort of physical relationship with him but of course it wasn't supposed to come into play while we were on duty (...rats).

Something was wrong outside the space station, an air conduit had come loose (looked like a dryer hose with a sealing gasket on the end) and it affected some other major defense ability (I don't remember what... and if it had something to do with life-support, it doesn't seem like that was the only thing it affected). My commanding officer wanted one of the skinny tech guys to do it (he looked and acted like Jessie from The Fast & The Furious and I think had that name in the dream). Jessie was cleared for space walks but technically the hose/gasket issue wasn't his specialty. Vin was good at it.

I went with my orders, though, and once Jessie was out there he was having major problems and couldn't seem to do it. He was also getting flustered by the back-and-forth trade of energy beams between us and the bad guys. I asked Vin if he remembered a bunch of us back in training camp doing a mission that required this exact thing to be fixed and how long it took us to finish and how it'd made one of the girls cry, but he could do it perfectly every time. He did remember quite well, but meanwhile Jessie still wasn't getting anywhere. We were running out of time.

I walked over to Vin and told him to get out there and do it, regardless of the fact that I hadn't received that order and he knew it too. He got pissed and stormed off, angry that I hadn't let him go out in the first place. I followed him, begging him to stop and please not leave, and ended up chasing him around a short circular route through dark closets full of clothing and hallways and I couldn't catch up with him, he always stayed ahead of me.

I stopped, I was crying by now and crouched on the floor in one of the closets. I said I was sorry, that I should have ignored my orders and that I didn't want to lose him. I told him I loved him... and I don't think I'd done that before. I didn't want it to sound like a last-ditch effort to keep him from leaving completely... I meant every word. I didn't want to lose him. I hoped he'd stopped ahead of me to listen but I didn't know for sure, I was looking at the floor and wiping my eyes and wondering if it was really over and I'd lost him thanks to my bad decision. A few moments later he appeared behind me, having gone around the circuit again, and he stood there looking thoughtful and a touch wistful. He said, "Maybe I've been going about things the wrong way all this time. I always take off, make an impression..." I don't remember what else he said, but it was obvious he was going to stick around and we now had to find him his space suit.

The problem was that apparently if they weren't clean or had been worn by someone else, they got horribly dirty and smelly even in one use. If it had been Vin's from a previous run it wouldn't be quite so bad, but we couldn't seem to find any suits or even pieces of them. The area we were searching looked like an upper-class home, with several bathrooms and various other rooms. I finally found what the dream said was part of the suit, and I noticed that it looked cleaner than normal. What it was was a shirt, combat vest, and cargo pants in shades of khaki all set up nicely on a hangar held up on something on the wall. Vin grabbed it and said something like, "I'll see you on the flip side," and I knew he was heading for the showers which was apparently a necessary step in spacewalking.

Meanwhile I had to find the rest of the suit, y'know, like gloves, boots, and a helmet. This was failing miserably, as the space station still looked like an upper-class home and all I was finding in various closets were normal boots, shoes, gloves... eventually I heard Vin taping himself in preparation, post-shower, and wondered if he had any clothes on yet. Nevermind that it's really absurd to think that he was using masking tape on various parts of his body as another necessary pre-walk step. I kept looking for the suit pieces, getting frazzled at my total lack of finding them and knowing we were badly running out of time.

I was myself, more or less, trapped on a planet with bioraptors (the monsters from Pitch Black) except I'm not sure I was supposed to know that. Some part of my brain did, though, but meanwhile myself, a few other random people, and Riddick were finding light sources in a weird small metal room that was partly above-ground and had a hatch on top, situated on the edge of a field beside a junkyard. We found these black rubber headbands that had several small bright-white lights along the tops of them. I also found two flashlights, one working and one broken. I remember thinking maybe I could learn something about what broke the light, but then I decided there wasn't enough time and it wasn't important enough. We knew that whatever dangerous thing had already killed some people didn't like light (I can't remember earlier in the dream, but I do remember that we knew something icky was out there). Unfortunately, the sun had gone down and it was getting to the point where leftover sunset wasn't going to save us.

This part is hazy, but I think someone was running through the junkyard and either said the creatures were coming or got wasted. Either way, the next thing that happens is we're all running across the field, away from the junkyard / hatch-room. I see Riddick's point of view for a moment as he passes me fast, then I'm back to myself and I'm having trouble running. (I'm out of shape in real-life which was affecting the dream, and also was having that nightmarish having-trouble-running issue.) I think I called out for Riddick as I kept struggling onwards, and I didn't actually expect him to do anything besides keep running. Everyone else was doing the same, and I think I was the most behind.

He came back for me (♥), picked me up fast and carried me (I had my arms around his neck and legs around his waist, facing him). He made much better progress than I had even with him carrying my weight (which, ironically, seemed to be a bit less at this point). We made it to an area that was considered safer at the edge of the field (can't remember why, but the other people were rendezvousing there).

It's daytime and I'm on a road trip with my entire immediate family (parents and three siblings). At some point all the water in the car starts turning into foamy orange liquid like melted sherbert meets fizzing-out soda. We get out of the car and realize it's happening to all water sources around us (other people pulled over too). As we're wondering what the heck is going on, it's suddenly nighttime and UFOs appear and suddenly these white yeti-like creatures are appearing and killing people. (They looked like the typical yeti from World of Warcraft.)

As we're running away, I try to write in a small notebook what happened in case the US Government comes here and finds the place wiped out and can't figure out what happened before it's too late. (I remember some daylight while I was writing, but only for that part.) I have alot of trouble actually writing this properly (and actually think in the dream something about how it can be hard to read and write in a dream because the wrong part of the brain is in use) but eventually get it down after concentrating really hard.

The yeti are currently distracted killing others further behind us (I think one of my brothers got it at that point, the older one) and the rest of us find a lake. We jump in without a second thought and start swimming, thinking that if the yeti go off smell this will throw them off. The surface of the water has dark foamy residue from the water-transforming thing from earlier but it's still mostly real water.

My kid sister starts talking about something random and wants to show off a song of some sort and starts yelling it really loudly. I keep trying to tell her to shut up, but can only do so by being louder than her. This attracts the attention of the yeti, who are now coming after us. I think they got my sister... and maybe my mom... and also now we're being chased by crocodiles that the noise drew in as well.

The water is clean now and it's daytime again and we're swimming like mad trying to follow currents in this river we entered at the end of the lake. (The currents go faster than the rest of the water.) I think my kid brother was lost somewhere during this part. That left my father and I, and the dream started really falling apart during some odd conversation while swimming about "being a man" (and yes, at the end, I was a man, sort of late-middle-age and balding? lol). The water turned into an odd series of flat wooden trays with numbers on them and... okay I can't even describe it really. FAIL.

I was in a space ship flying along through outer space, past planets that looked familiar (to an Earthling). But I wasn't actually from Earth... I decided I was going to go visit though.

The next thing I remember is flying through the atmosphere, past clouds on a nice sunny day. I had a robotic protective casing or body (maybe I was some sort of advanced AI?) with jets on my back and/or feet. I looked down at Earth, and I saw that the people in the area I was going to land in had set up a huge parade to greet me with. They were doing a bunch of colorful displays with big squares people held up towards the sky in carefully-coordinated geometric patterns.

Oddly enough, I saw another pattern like the ones the people were making, but these were green squares. I flew closer and landed, and they were tiny green squares being moved around by ants. I let a couple ants wander onto my fingers, but I realized they didn't have the sort of intelligence I was looking for when it came to communication. They were just ants. Important, no doubt, to the ecology of the planet, but not the species I had come to talk to.

So anyways, I finally approached the ambassadors of the planet who'd come to greet me, and for one reason or another ended up following them to an odd earth-lined cell-like chamber that was currently under investigation. Apparently some nasty creature had killed several people, and I recognized the signs as a creature that had been an illegal experiment to do with my own kind or some other alien species we had an alliance with. I was appalled that the experiment was apparently continuing, and its creations sent to plague the people of Earth. I expressed this to the Earthlings, and I think offered to help them with the situation as best I could.

There was more to this dream, but what I remember was running down an asphalt road at night. I think I was trying to get away from someone? But I was alone for the moment. Bright light hit me and I looked up, knowing nothing should be up there. All I could see was a bright point of light that was rather close and coming closer. I knew it was something from another world. Aliens, whoo!

I stopped, I didn't run and I wasn't afraid. I waited, and I felt pulled up into the light. A voice spoke to me as I felt pulled through time and space to a very futuristic world. The voice told me not to be afraid and that they needed my help to save their existence from what seemed like an overpowering threat. I was the only one who could do it, or so their calculations had told them. I was placed in a space ship that I suddenly knew how to pilot, and this ship was smack in the middle of a large space battle. The ship was a fighter so I zoomed through the chaos and let fly with whatever firepower the ship had.

(Shane is my original character created for a bad-fanfiction-waiting-to-happen based on the universe of the movie The Chronicles of Riddick. Shane is Richard B. Riddick's daughter and looks about 12 years old.)

I started this dream as Riddick, let loose in a large prison environment containing some sort of haphazard structure in the center of a gargantuan "room" that had a dirt floor and extremely sparse plants scattered around, almost like an enclosed biosphere, except square and surrounded by walls and a ceiling. I was closest to the central structure so I climbed to the top, killing everyone on the way, and becoming "king of the hill." More prisoners were drawn to the fracas and were going to attempt to take me out.

Then the powers that be released zombies into the grounds. As Riddick found his own way to escape, I became Shane who was busy running from zombie death. Toombs was right behind her, apparently the bounty hunter had managed to land himself a prison sentence. I ran to the nearest edge of the building (it felt like the east side) and saw a hose in the corner (south-east side). I turned it on and was quite happy to see it actually worked at all. It worked well, and I was able to fend off some zombies with the jet of water as they didn't like it for some reason.

There was a line of windows above me, and I could see that the closest one was open but not normally reachable by one person (great prison security, eh?). Toombs was asking how anything I was doing was helping either of us get out as I wrapped the end of the hose around my waist. I told him to watch me and do what I did after I got up to the window. I turned the water on real hard, and the force of the water in the hose lifted me up. I was able to guide the direction in which the hose lifted me and was soon up on the window ledge. Toombs turned the water down enough that I could throw him the hose, and then had some trouble getting the hose concept to work for himself until he realized he was heavier than I was, and needed to turn the water up higher.

Meanwhile I jumped out of the window, a little afraid I might hurt myself on the way down but at this point it was better than being eaten by zombies, or staying in prison at all. I made it okay and started running away from the prison into the semi-darkness before morning. I looked back to see Toombs reach the window's edge; he was too large to fit through the gap I'd just left through, so he just kicked the whole window out and dropped to the ground to follow me.

There was a problem with the landscape now: further east was a sheer cliff going upwards that joined with a mountain range to the northeast, to the south was an impassable ravine, and to the north and west the country was flat red clay and dust with no cover for quite some distance. It would take much too long to run anywhere and surely the prison guards would recapture us out there. But to the northeast was a cave that went into the cliffside, so I headed for that even though I wasn't happy with the lack of choices. I had a feeling this was the way Riddick had gone, but I couldn't see him anywhere and put that thought aside as there were more pressing matters to attend to.

At the entrance to the cave was a skeleton sitting in front of a campfire that was currently in full-flamey-swing. The formerly-living looked as if it had starved to death or something, and in its bony fingers it held a tea candle in a candle holder. The candle was lit (yet its owner was long dead, go figure) and now I became Toombs as Shane took the candle and ventured into the cave ahead of me. It was a poor light source but better than nothing, as I had a feeling we'd need it (I somehow knew there might be light-fearing aliens on this planet like the ones in the movie Pitch Black).

The spaces we crawled through were rather cramped, and in a larger area the ceiling was still so low that Shane had to duck. She stopped for a moment, and I warned her just in time before she moved again; I grabbed her shoulder, there was a flock of those nasty tiny creatures right over her head. She ducked further to avoid them, as somehow they hadn't noticed us (yay alien sleep?) and we entered another room barely larger than the last.

Here there were two dog-like creatures, each about the size of a large housecat. We both knew they were vicious, insane creatures who would eat anything that wasn't one of them. I became Shane again (which put me closer to the dogs), and at this point we couldn't turn back so I pressed forward, slowly, trying to exude the feeling that I belonged here, that I was actually one of the crazy doggies and everything was cool. The problem was, they'd acquired a large chunk of meat that was some poor hapless thing's former body. It was in the way, considering the two dogs were on either side of it. And on the far side was the exit from the cave, I could see daylight beyond.

One of the dogs was snoozing while the other munched half-asleep on the body. All I could really do was move into the corpse, and unfortunately the end that moved was the end the awake-dog was eating. The dog whined in sleepy annoyance and I tried to make generic "I belong here too, hello doggy family" noises. Amazingly, this worked, and I was able to get past the dogs with Toombs following right behind.

It was a massive relief to get out of the caves finally, and we found ourselves in a small, meandering canyon of the red clay stuff prevalent to the area.

Then the dream logic bailed on me and I'm not gonna get into the rest.

(The initial intro here is the built-in past that came with my dream self. The part of the dream I remember begins with the alien prison system.)

I was myself, but an ultimate future version. Apparently I'd overcome my difficulties and excelled even physically far enough to join the US military. I'm not sure how old I was, but it didn't seem like it mattered because I was in such good shape. I was respected in my unit and had done great things. I'd patterned myself after the military version of Vin Diesel's movie characters and considered him my role model, so much so that I probably thought almost like he did.

But then aliens had attacked earth. (They looked like Covenant Elite from Halo 2, which I played quite a bit of yesterday.) We fought back but it was a losing battle. So many died, but some of us were captured. Quite a few, in fact. The aliens shipped us all to another planet and stuck us in a prison made for slave labor.

Our first test was to climb down this very long strange grating that led eventually to the prison floor. The thing was probably at least fifteen stories high. Anybody who fell died and wasn't considered worthy of living or working for the aliens. This task was easy enough and I progressed downwards quicktly. Two guys by me were talking even while a loud PA system kept repeating rules like "Absolutely no talking." They tried to get me to talk too, I whispered a couple things and then decided it wasn't worth the risk and shut up. I didn't even look at them anymore, I wasn't gonna get in trouble. The other guys kept talking and I listened intently as they discussed a rumor about someone having escaped from this prison some time ago. The guy was legendary for having done it and it was supposed to be impossible, all the guards said so and denied the escape rumor. I latched onto this idea, believing it fully, and knew if anyone was getting out again, it'd be me.

It wasn't long before the guys near me got fried by flying alien-built robot things for talking. They fell and were probably already dead before they hit bottom; I didn't watch, I concentrated on my descent. I made it to the ground floor unscathed and stayed put in a courtyard where guards watched everyone coming down. The guards were human, but not earth human... I knew there was some sort of evil human race beyond our planet who was allied with the aliens. (There are in fact no more Halo-2-ish aliens visible from this point on in the dream.)

Once everyone in my group was down, the guards started dividing us into two groups. There were two guards in charge of this and one was female. She and I were the only females on the floor. The male guard asked my name and I told him "Tirsden." I figured there was no point in using my earth name (Kat/Katrina) and my online alias would be best now. If I had a choice about anything, they'd call me what I wanted them to call me. The guard pointed to the farther group and told me to join them. I was half way across the floor when the female guard said she had something important to tell him and he told me to stop. I did and stood there apparently just being obedient but I listened hard and could just make out the conversation (my hearing was very good, obviously better than they thought).

The woman said that she'd accidentally found one of the "eyes" that the higher ups used to see the "invisible ones" in the hallways. The male guard thought this was very interesting but told her to talk to him again later, they had work to do. Meanwhile I'm thinking this lady has an unscheduled date with me as soon as possible so I can snag this "eye." And now I knew there was some sort of secret backup security system. I could imagine floating monstrocities in prison barracks hallways silently killing inmates lucky enough to make it that far while trying to escape. It was an easy guess none of the prisoners knew about this... except the unlucky dead ones.

The male guard told me to continue on to my group and I obeyed. We were all marched through a passage to another smaller courtyard. There was a yellow line painted across the middle of it. The PA was still blaring repetative rules, "No talking... No fighting..." No this, no that. Be good little inmates. The guard ordered us to line up on the yellow line and face to the right (straight along the line). I did this and a few others complied just as quickly. Some others straggled. The guard didn't immediately react, he just watched, so one of them got particularly cocky. This mean, short, ugly guy wanted to pick a fight with me, hoping to get me in trouble. He told me I was in his spot; I ignored him. He tried various insults as I stood there being a good little inmate. He got really pissed at my continued indifference and shoved me. I kept my feet and remained where I was, didn't even turn to him.

The guard walked up to me and said, "Put him in his place." Before the idiot behind me knew what happened I'd spun around and he was on the ground beside the line, face pressed painfully into the ground and completely incapacitated. I'd broken a bone or two in key locations. He blubbered like a baby and wet himself. He wouldn't be moving within the next few minutes so I got right back up, performed a perfect military salute to the guard, and got back into my place in line as if nothing had happened. I wasn't even winded, just stood there calmly with rigid military posture.

The guard was obviously impressed. And that was the point of all this apparent obedience. I wanted to make it look like I was extremely adaptable and ready to prove my allegience to the new reigning power. If the people I worked for before couldn't keep control then they didn't deserve it and I was ready to be recruited by the other side. In reality though I was only going to play their game long enough to get them back big-time. But I shoved that thought deep down and made sure I kept in character. I was a good little inmate. I wanted to be more. But I didn't expect to be rewarded until I had proved my worth. So I was a good little inmate.

The guard ordered us all to move again and as we went down the next passage I heard other guards take care of the moron on the ground with precision that brought screams and the finality of silence. We passed some windows where we could see a gigantic, highly-mechanized assembly line creating strange looking robots and who-knows-what. We could see prisoners working the line and somebody died because they were stupid and didn't move fast enough; part of the machinery flattened them coldly. We continued on down more passages and soon found ourselves in a very earth-like locker room. The guard told us to change into uniforms readily available in the lockers. He also said we could talk to each other now if we wanted. He left and there were no other guards in the room. I reached for a uniform, they were all the same (in different sizes) and were mostly bright-yet-light yellow with similarly-shaded orange trim and some white too. They were simple yet semi-futuristicly cut one-piece jumpsuits. I couldn't help but think of the outfits from the XBox game The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay except these looked better.

I was the only woman still but changing out of my clothes and into the new ones didn't phase me, I was used to it from military days. Plus I knew our captors were watching on what looked like closed circuit cameras in the ceilings but I guessed they probably had far more advanced technology spying on us as well. Everyone's conversation was rather guarded because of the cameras. I'd just finished suiting up and was talking to a black guy with crazy hair when all of a sudden Candy shows up. (My real-life family's cat! Geez she's been showing up in dreams a lot lately lol.) I was very surprised to see her at this point... how'd she manage that? Since she was there I wanted to be sure she remained safe and I figured the alien guys wouldn't like her at all and would probably kill her since she was virtually useless. (If I reference aliens from now on I'm really meaning the human version; I thought of them all as aliens.)

I held Candy and she was very cuddly and obviously scared but happy to be with me. A moment later the male guard came back into the room and walked over, saying I was to come with him. I asked him if my black friend could look after Candy and the guard said yes. Apparently I'd impressed him enough that he'd let the cat live at least as well as it could with a random inmate. Since I was being singled out I had a feeling I wasn't coming back here. I handed the kitty to the black guy and followed the guard out of the room. Good luck, Candy...

The guard directed me down hallways, keeping me in the lead. (At this point I became Richard B. Riddick, yay! I love being him in dreams. And dream logic didn't seem to think there was anything wrong with this; it's like I'd been him the whole time. Even back when I was in the military and then fighting aliens on earth.) The guard was following me with his gun trained on my back. He wasn't stupid even if he was impressed with me. I ended up in a round room with a lighted floor and ceiling. Windows were set into the walls and the only places that had no windows were where the doors were. There were about four doors total. The room was quite bright but it was hard to see past the windows; they were tinted to look darker.

The guard handed me a golden bracelet with a shiny red stone in the middle of it. It was thick in the middle and had one straight edge on the bottom and the other side was pointed out like an upside-down "V." He told me how to put it on and I placed it on my right wrist as directed. The pointed part came up over the back of my hand some. The entire thing was rather beautiful if simplistic and very shiny. The stone was not facetted but smooth, set so far in that its top rounded surface was raised just slightly above the rest of the bracelet. The stone was somewhat tear-shaped and longer than rounder. The point of it was set the same direction as the point of the bracelet (straight out) and in roughly the center of the top area.

The guard told me to stay there and I stood still in the middle of the room looking at the bracelet. He left and the door hissed shut. I saw him enter a control room on the far side of the windows and then the room got even brighter. I looked back at the bracelet and it was melting, moving, like mercury; like the stuff Neo gets on his hand when he touches the mirror in The Matrix. Even the red stone was running and merging with the gold stuff. It covered my hand but didn't move up my arm. It started to hurt. It was melting into my skin! Merging with me.

I tried to keep calm but nausea threatened to overwhelm me. The pain was becoming intense and it was moving through my body now, like the gold stuff was in my bloodstream. I found myself on my knees. I didn't want to freak out... I wanted to continue to impress the guard. I could deal with this. I could. I... I fell over and curled up, just living through the pain, the only outward signs that I was hurting were the grimace on my face and my rapid breathing. I couldn't move anymore. I passed out.

* * *

I'm not sure how long I'd been asleep when I woke up. I felt terribly groggy and had the impression I'd woken up a few times before but not with any real lucidity. I was able to get to my knees and there was no sound, the room was back to its original brightness before the whole bracelet thing. The bracelet! I looked at my wrist and it was there but it was different now, the red stone was visible but it was like the whole thing had become a permanent part of my hand. It was solid metal yet didn't interfere with my wrist movement. I wondered if it had replaced some of my wrist bones with metal or biomechanics. I couldn't tell, it just looked... kinda pretty. But manly pretty. (LMAO the things I think in dreams, eh? I was thinking it looked like something He-Man or Conan the Barbarian would wear.)

Nothing had happened so far, it was silent and I couldn't see the guard or anyone else in the control room. I couldn't really see through the windows at all, it was very dark behind them. Maybe someone was there. But there was something weirder much closer to me. There was blue slimy stuff on the floor. It was spread out like I'd been thrashing in it. I had a feeling it had something to do with what the bracelet had done. The word that came to mind was "transformation." I touched the blue stuff, it reminded me of shampoo in texture. It didn't seem harmful. I had a feeling it had come out of me somehow; apparently I didn't need it anymore.

Then there was a voice in my head. It was Cortana!

(And now I must take a moment to explain what the dream logic was doing at this point. Cortana is a female computer AI system from the game Halo 2, she speaks to the character you play through his helmet system. She can be transferred to other computer systems by touch through your suit and she provides information, witty comments, and sometimes unlocks doors. In the dream it appears Cortana was being used to guide people in the military during the battle against the aliens. I knew now that she'd been there "in my head" in an implant that communicated her words directly to my brain. She could also see anything I could see and had very limited control of my muscles if needed. She'd lost contact with me when I'd been captured by the aliens and was only now able to reestablish contact.)

Cortana sounded extremely surprised to find me alive and said so. She was glad, but where was I? What was going on? Was I okay? ...Why was I not responding? All she could tell right now was that I was still looking at the blue stuff on the floor. I had to think fast through the grogginess that still plagued me. If I didn't respond somehow she might think I'd been brainwashed or was unsavable and she would then cut off all contact with me forever for security reasons. But if I talked, and there was someone in the control room, they would know something was up. I couldn't let them know Cortana was talking to me and it was pretty obvious they didn't know or they'd be in here now. They'd probably kill me. I ran my fingers through the goop on the floor in frustration... and then I knew what to do.

I drew a happy face very quickly, staring at it intently, and whiped it out of existence. Cortana realized what I was trying to say... that I was okay but couldn't talk and/or was being watched. I don't remember the conversation very well now (writing and reading in dreams is hard) but it seems like my limited method of communication had only limited success. I wrote someone's name, a higher-up, wondering if they were alive and hadn't been captured. Cortana made me whipe the name away very quickly. Apparently it was crucial that name not be seen at all. I got the hint. Maybe they had been captured but the aliens didn't really know who they were looking for and the person had remained anonymous so far. I wrote "President?" as well and Cortana made me whipe it out again. Then she cut out in mid-sentence. I'd lost the signal again... and the lights got brighter in the room. The guards were apparently noticing I was awake. That was all, it seems.

I could now see the male guard from before on the other side of the control room windows. He spoke into the PA and said I was going to be tested. They wanted to see how well my conversion had gone. I realized that while I was asleep, some built-in system in the technology on my wrist had trained me in it's proper use. (I think this is a random reference to a similar concept in the game Morrowind when you get the wristguard you need to beat the game.) I was feeling better now, in fact I felt just fine.

The room changed, it reminded me of the holodecks on Star Trek. The walls got wider, making the room bigger, and dirt and rocks appeared on the ground. The doors hissed open and a dozen zombie-like crazy humans stumbled in. They took one look at me and charged. They were not slow/stupid zombies but fast/smart zombies. Eh oh. Oh well, bring it on! In top shape this would be a challenge but doable. But now... I kicked serious ass and I kicked it fast. I was thoroughly surprised at my improved strength, stamina, and speed. I could even think faster, and fighting a dozen crazy things was actually easy. They were all dead before five minutes had passed. The zombies faded as if transported somewhere else and I stood there waiting, barely even winded and pretty psyched up.

The guard voiced his approval and congratulations, and then one door hissed open again. In came a very big, strong, pissed-off looking guy. He came after me and this fight was much tougher than the last even though it was only one guy. It was hard to do any damage to him and I spent most of my time avoiding his fists because I had a bad feeling one solid hit would spell doom. In the end I used all my fighting expertise and agility to take him out with one deft hit to a specific spot in his neck. He fell like a ton of lead and I snapped his neck. Sucked to be him. He too disappeared into thin air. Somebody had a nasty clean-up job wherever all these bodies were going. I waited again, I was feeling some wear now but still ready for anything.

I was on the far side of the room from the windows with the guard at this point. The guard voiced his approval again and said my final test was next. There was a slanted rock over near the control room. Someone began to materialize there, instead of walking in through the doors. Oh god no... it was my best buddy from the military, the guy I'd fought alongside against the aliens. I thought he was dead... and yet, I knew this was him. It wasn't some illusion or hologram or lookalike. This was real. They expected me to kill my own buddy and thereby leave behind everything from my old life. In fact, if I didn't kill him fast, my hesitation would clue them in that I wasn't already completely loyal to them.

As I moved towards him I could see that he was lying there very awkwardly; he was paralyzed, his back was probably broken. He was staring at me, confused and afraid but glad to see me. I'm not even sure he could move or talk at all, just look at me. He thought... maybe I was going to save him.

(At this point my brain replayed the following moments until it was happy with the end results, like loading and reloading a saved game in a computer game.)

(First time)

I walked up to him and looked down at him. His look of hope turned to a look of haunting disbelief as I reached down and started to strangle him. He eventually stopped breathing but it felt like an eternity to me as he stared up at me with that heartbreaking look on his face. I knew exactly when to let go so that maybe his body would force him to breathe again after a few minutes, or if he was lucky someone would find him soon enough to resuscitate him. I let go and stood up. He was technically dead. But no, I didn't like this version...

(Second time)

I walked up more quickly this time as if this wasn't even an issue to me. I started the strangling thing again but a moment later realized how hard it must be to die this way... so I snapped his neck and he died instantly. I wasn't really all that happy with this version either...

(Third and last time)

He looked at me as I approached and I saw a different look this time. It said so many things... like, he knew he was a goner, he knew the aliens were testing me and I'd win their trust if I killed him. He was in pain and dying anyways. He'd much rather I killed him than these alien bastards. I walked straight up to him and snapped his neck. I believed he felt no pain and was finally at rest where the aliens could never hurt him again.

And I knew I'd impressed hell out of the guard and whoever else was watching. I was headed for big things under their wing... and when the moment was right, vengeance. They would pay. Oh yes, they would pay.

(Possibly inspired by reading The Art Of The Matrix and a short conversation with my kid sister about stealing cars.)

I don't remember if I saw the actual invasion or if I just heard/knew about it happening. An alien race of high technology was taking over our planet. They were enslaving millions, killing those who would not surrender (and killing lots anyways). A few of us managed to hide, but we knew they were coming. There were two groups, I (as myself) was in the first group with my real-life mother and sister, and the group seemed to consist mostly of women and children. The second group was all men. We did not know at this point if the second group had survived. I figured if we waited around we'd get killed.

So I spoke to the people gathered around that we had to go to the source if we were going to have a remote chance in hell to fight the aliens. It was blatantly obvious that aliens existed, so that meant that our government really did have a crashed alien ship in their possession (viva la conspiracy theories!) and they were probably researching and even using the technology from it already. I told the people around me we were going to Area 51. (For some reason I thought it was in Arizona throughout the dream, though that doesn't make sense upon waking... but I guess the dream logic figured that was close enough. Plus, my group was located somewhere near Washington D.C. so Arizona was just as far away as New Mexico considering at the moment all we had was our feet to travel with.)

I looked out of the warehouse we were hiding in, and there was a car in the dusty parking lot, baking under the hot sun. I ran to it and found the keys in the ignition. It started and someone said it was wrong to steal and I said it was our only chance. The owner might be dead anyways. So everyone else piled in (there might have been two cars, I forget) and we drove off. It seems like we had to switch vehicles at some point when we ran out of gas, and it took us longer to find cars with keys. I remember thinking that if the human resistance lasted long enough, someone should set up usable car hubs for people fleeing but especially for resistance group members to move around the country. Take a car, drive it to the next hub, get a new one.

The next thing I knew I was suddenly a member of the second group, a random white male character. This was the all-guy group, and we were on foot. We knew the aliens were not far behind and tracking us somehow. It was somewhat snowy and we put logs and big sticks across our path at random points. It seems like we knew the aliens had trouble getting past these (or some metal-like alien-made machine did) so at first it was worth it. We heard the aliens making annoyed sounds at our previous roadblock (we were on a path though, not a road). This caused some satisfaction in our group but I figured they were too close for comfort now and we had better just run.

I told the guys to be careful so they didn't fall, to run steady and not too fast. I was in the lead and made my way over some wet, potentially slippery rocks, and beyond. I remember thinking we were trying to catch up to the first group, and I remember something about the first group trying to figure out how to leave behind some sign of where they were going without giving the whole thing away to the aliens.

Then I saw a black guy in a car (seen from like a camera angle or perhaps from the perspective of one of the second group members). He'd stolen the car and it seems like he was a key resistance leader, maybe even the top guy. He looked like Samuel L. Jackson but a little younger. He was pulling up to a corner to turn left.

Then I was him. I don't think I was going anywhere specific, probably just on the run. I was driving casually and this seemed to be fairly normal, other people were driving along like there wasn't some huge alien invasion going on. I saw up ahead a bunch of cars driving closely together, and too slow. I felt like it was a trap, they wanted me to pass and the aliens must know where I was. There was a dirt road up ahead on the right and I took that instead (still driving somewhat casually). As I took the turn I noticed a huge semitruck come up into opposing traffic in the space I would have been in if I'd tried to pass the cars. As if in a movie, I heard the aliens or some people working for them (or the aliens could shapeshift to look human) saying over the radio "He didn't take it."

Now I was driving down the dirt road with an open field on the right and a dead-looking corn field on the left. I knew I was in potential danger but figured the aliens hadn't planned on me going this way, so I had some time. But then up ahead I saw an ambulance, two cars right behind it, and another ambulance following right behind the lot. Damn radios, they were able to move fast because of the communication. I think they might have been hoping that I'd think they were real ambulances and pull over to clear the road. I was definitely not stopping for that. They pulled into my lane, heading straight for me, and as I slowed down they stopped completely. I could see a big (red?) pickup truck coming up behind them fast, essentially blocking the opposing lane of traffic and there wasn't any more room to drive past the cars and ambulances.

A woman who might not actually know what's going on at this moment was now beside the closest ambulance. There was a big, somewhat-evil looking man near her. The pickup almost hit the woman but the man pulled her out of the way at the last second. I'm not sure what happened to the pickup after that (although it's angle would have put it in the field to the right).

Meanwhile, the road was thoroughly blocked now by even more vehicles. Well, I wasn't going down here. I opened the car door and bailed into the cornfield. The corn stalks didn't even have much in the way of corn on them, and they were tall, dried up spindly things that didn't give much cover unless I had a lot of distance between me and my attackers. The aliens chased me, except they were human looking or humans in league with them. I have a feeling some of them were actual aliens, some were converted humans (mind control?) and some just hired people, maybe even innocent and thinking they were working for honest humans, not aliens.

Several times various people got close and each time I sprayed bullets their way (yay for instant dream uzi's... maybe I got one off a soldier, some of the people chasing me appeared to be in the National Guard). I realized too many of my pursuers were too close and I dove to the ground trying to hide. Some part of me knew that the cover here was too scant but I thought as hard as I could "they can't see me" and it worked. I was able to move ahead slowly, barely crawling along.

Ahead were two people arguing about trying to find me. One was a white woman, she had a uniform on and seemed to be in charge. The other was a black woman, a hireling of some sort, maybe a mercenary type, and she was saying that I'd "just... vanished." The black woman was scared. She thought I might be some sort of legendary evil spirit or something. She said "Naga" like she was even afraid of saying the word. She refused to keep searching even though the woman threatened her, and walked off. (Maybe the white woman killed her for such insubordination, maybe the black lady managed her own vanishing act, I don't know.)

I couldn't keep hiding forever and on a mad dash they spotted me and shot me with some sort of tranquilizer. As I fell I rolled into a clearing in the cornfield. I fought the drug in order to stay conscious, but I didn't move. I lay still with my eyes closed so they wouldn't know I was still awake. I was lying on my chest and felt horribly heavy from the drug but I figured if I had one chance now, it was to keep hold of reality. Maybe I could find the right moment to run... if I could still run...

The bad guys came and one of them held me down with his knee in my back while the others surrounded me with guns pointed down at me. Someone came up and lifted my head a little. I felt fingers opening my left eyelid and I saw a nurse (a very stereotypical, outdated looking nurse, who was probably a shapeshifted alien who'd watched a little too much 1940's earth television). She used the little finger on her left hand to poke lightly at my eyeball. I remember being worried about her fingernail. I moved my eye only a little but still thought she might notice I was awake. But she seemed satisfied after a few pokes and let go of my eye. Just as I was thinking I'd succeeded in keeping at least one small advantage I felt a prick somewhere in my back and a very powerful dose of some drug sent me to unconsciousness.

I was instantly dreaming, I knew it, but it was unlike any other dream I'd ever had. The world was in shades of black and white, and even the sound in the air around me seemed foreign. I was breathing and could hear it like a controlled rush as I stared out what must have been some sort of helmet. I was looking at the corn field, the clearing I'd fallen into, but the scene had been surreally transformed into perfect right angles. The corn was no longer a mass of spindly stalks but featureless flat hedge-looking things. I was standing in the clearing, and it made a hallway between these odd flat wall-hedges that stretched out in front of me, before it ended in a T junction that led to thinner passages to the left and right. I felt rather than saw tubes coming from my helmet into my suit (some sort of space suit?) The helmet must have been large, because all I could see was the glass/clear protective surface before me that curved the secenery at the very edges of my vision. I realized that I was an alien now, a real alien, somehow connected to it, but I honestly felt like I was the alien. The end result was frighteningly realistic, but in effect redefining "real" because I wasn't human anymore.

There was nobody in the clearing ahead of me. I turned and saw someone behind me... it was the old me! The me I had been before this terrible dream. He was just standing there with an odd, somewhat stupid smile on his face. I felt such an intense and complete hatred for this man that I immediately reached out and grabbed the human face and head in my hands. (The alien hands were suited up almost like a typical astronaut in a space suit, only less bulky, and the gloved fingers and hands were human shaped.) I squeezed the man's head and crushed it, killing him. I dropped the body and turned back the way I'd originally been facing. I walked to the end of the corridor, all the time hearing the terrible breathing... my breathing...

There was bright light above me and I looked up, raising my arms in the glare and feeling a strange mix of familiarity and total exaltation. I felt my body being sucked up into the transporter of the alien vessel not far above me, like I became a digital painting that streaked upwards, first from my fingers and helmet and continuing quickly down until I was completely transferred to the receiving pod inside the ship.

The next thing I remember is a great, dark space, like the interior of a huge ship. A sinking feeling that I'd been asleep all this time and woken up who-knows-where under complete alien control told me that I was myself again... at least. But I wasn't sure how I was seeing what was before my eyes. It was like the ship I was in was transparent or at least the bulk of it seemed to be to my right and a little above me. Ahead of the alien ship was a pulsing beam of light that flexed a little like a frequency wave turned 3D. The ship was travelling along the light beam like it was a travel route; it disappeared into the front of the ship somewhere and I'm not sure if it continued out the back of the ship... it may not have.

The ship was going slowly and the whole time I could hear a loud, metallic, and vaguely deep voice saying over and over, "You are here. You are here. You are here." This vision didn't last long, as I moved almost involuntarily, trying to figure out if I could move at all, or where I was in all this. I felt sheets, the solidness of a bed below me, a very human feeling after such an alien experience. I was sure I'd seen the previous scenes, but had I been asleep and only just now woken? Had I been able to unwittingly access some sort of alien viewing system with my mind? Had I connected telepathically with the alien who I'd envisioned... killing me in the corn field? Had my death only been some wish or delusion on the part of the alien? I was obviously still alive... and in a bed somewhere... in alien custody, right?

Then I realized I was awake, truly awake, and this had all been just a dream.

I was sitting with Bruce Wayne at a party of some sort, I'd call it a dinner party but it was daytime. The table was round and had a white tablecloth. It was just the two of us at that table, and there was a lamp/chandelier hanging above us. Other people were seated at similar tables around the room.

Suddenly the clown/jester girl who's the Joker's sidekick shows up (I forget her name, she's in Batman: The Animated Series). She hangs a piñata from the lamp above our table and starts yelling "It's piñata time! It's piñata time!" She gets out a stick and is makes like she's going to hit it. This whole time I'm thinking, this is rather inappropriate for a gathering like this, or at least for this moment in the party. Then I notice that there is green smoke or mist coming out of a small nozzle near the top of the piñata.

People around us start couging and dying and crap and Bruce and I managed to hold our breaths in time but still got some of whatever's in the air. We're trying to crawl towards the windows, and make it to one that reaches all the way down to the floor. One of us breaks it (maybe he did, I really don't remember) and we crawl outside. It seems like the gas in our lungs has an adverse reaction to fresh air for a moment, as if that was some sort of built in added-nastiness, so we try not to breathe for a moment longer. Then, while I'm gasping for breath and trying to regain my strength, Bruce goes back in to see if he can help anyone or fight the bad guys or something.

Then the dream shifted weirdly, to some sort of ice-age thing still somehow related to the Batman concept. I remember sliding down a long tunnel/slide inside of a bunch of ice or a glacier, and as I went down it I saw flying saucers and vague alien monster shapes frozen in the ice above (most likely a reference to the movie Ice Age). Then I came out under water, under a fairly thick sheet of ice, and was worried I would drown. Someone broke the ice... I think they pulled me out...